Rachel Carson's reputation as a force in the environmental movement was manifested in her last book, Silent Spring, published in 1962. Famously known as the catalyst of the modern environmental movement, Silent Spring warned the general public about the dangers of environmental contamination and informed readers about the long and short term impacts of human-created pesticide contamination of our waterways. Between 1950-1962. the chemical DDT found in human tissue actually tripled. Arrogance could only lead to a destruction of the living world, which is why Carson pointedly asks her readers, "Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life?”. The endless process of using sprays, dust, and aerosols is why “[t]hey should not be called ‘insecticides' but `biocides’”. A wide interest was garnered and Carson had called out the contamination of the food chain, cancer, the deaths of entire species, genetic damage, cancer and reducing populations of the food chain; all of which were too frightening to ignore. For the first time, the need to regulate the industry to protect the environment became widely accepted, and modern environmentalism was formed. Rachel Carson should be considered the driving force of the environmentalist movement through her fourth book, “Silent Spring,” because it led to the rise of the powerful green movement, and a greater awareness to not punish wildlife indiscriminately.
Linda Lear, the author of the biography Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, believes that Carson saw “human beings in their post-World War II form as being arrogant, that human arrogance outruns human wisdom and we ought to try to put them back together as equals again” (“Rachel Carson” 3). DDT was first discovered to kill insects in 1939 by Paul Hermann Müller, who won the Nobel Prize in 1948 for this work. By the middle of 1944, TIME magazine had pronounced DDT “one of the great scientific discoveries of World War II.” During World War II, as to control lice in soldiers, DDT’s powdered form was applied to the skin. But it wasn’t just DDT’s effectiveness that led to its promotion, Carson believed that it was after the war, an excess of product caused the US Government to push DDT within the American consumer market. At the end of her third chapter, Elixirs of Death, she concludes “We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation.” Affected residents who wished to halt any aerial spraying on their property led to high-profile lawsuits regarding pesticides' harmful effects on birds and plants. After World War II, Carson used the era’s hysteria about radiation to grab her readers to attention, drawing attention to an invisible chemical threat of pesticides in “Silent Spring.”
Many prominent scientists stood to her defense, and when President John F. Kennedy ordered the President's Science Advisory Committee to examine the issues the book raised, Silent Spring and its author were both correct. Carson told this sub-committee, in her 1963 statement before Congress, “Our heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth and in time return to bring hazard to ourselves.” Because of this, DDT was eventually domestically banned by 1972 after it came under much closer government supervision. The public debate moved quickly to which pesticides were dangerous, and the burden of proof was pushed onto the manufacturers. In 1970, through Reorganization Plan No. 3 and President Richard Nixon's establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, his executive order stated the creation of "a strong, independent agency" that would consistently protect the environment because the government was "not structured to make a coordinated attack on the pollutants which debase the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land that grows our food”. Today, the continuous stand of the EPA regards the public's right to know about chemicals and other pollutants endangering their personal health, their surroundings, and their community. In her testimony before Congress, she argued for the tight control of aerial spraying and eradication of persistent pesticides because of its inability to breakdown in the environment. In fact, milk was banned from dairy farmer’s land after it was sprayed to remove gypsy moths. Because the application of insecticides also led to scorched plants and toxic residues accumulated in the soil, after Carson’s “Silent Spring of Rachel Carson" popularity grew, the Department of Agriculture protected plants and animals through systemic insecticides, increasingly aware of the dangers. The passage of environmental policy acts, popularly the Water Quality Act, and Clear Air Act followed the EPA, reduced some air, water, and endangerment abuses of the environment by investing millions in the study and cleanup, and implementation of various federal standards.
The scientific community also had known much about the data Carson researched from; it wasn’t new. However, Carson published these findings in an accessible, imaginable story-telling way of a world where she described the birds that stopped singing. She writes about fertilizers and pesticides destroying algae, fish, plants and animals from excess field runoff. Silent Spring also explains that target insect populations such as mosquitoes become genetically resistant to DDT, reducing its value. Most importantly, runoff and DDT's insolubility from water and fats allows it to build up i n organisms like the bald eagle, from the food chain, and soil; eggshell thinning from DDT declining the population of eagles. In 1966, a list of endangered domestic wildlife and =$15 million a year was allotted in the protection of such species. By 1995, eagles had 4,712 pairs, which is why it was no longer on the endangered species list. A species of birds was saved by Carson’s awareness of the damaging effects of pesticide pollution upon animal populations. Overall, Carson was generally recognized as the founder of twentieth-century environmentalism.
However, Carson being called as the “catalyst” of the modern environmental movement is quite debatable. The famous picture, ‘EarthRise,’ provided a perspective on the view of the whole planet Earth in color and rejected the division between people and the planet’s environment. Clearly, Earth had limits, with the “barely thicker than an apple’s skin” atmosphere. Earthrise can be considered the face of the modern environmentalist movement, the rise of which led on October 22, 1970, Earth Day, a 20 million people protest across the country, turning out as one of the grandest demonstrations in American history.
In 1964, when she died 8 months later, she had set in motion a course of events which would result in banning the domestic production of DDT by 1972 and pushed an entire movement to protect the government in regards to state and federal regulation. Most significantly, Rachel Carson's writing awakened the public environmental consciousness by providing a world-changing perspective on humanity’s mistreatment of the environment.
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Written by volunteer Nayana Sharma
Date Published: 12/07/2020
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Sources:
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Oravec, Christine. “Rachel Carson.” Pollution A to Z, edited by Richard M. Stapleton, Macmillan, Reference USA, 2004. Gale In Context: Global Issues.
Poole, Robert. "Earthrise (Bill Anders, 1968)." America in the World, 1776 to the Present: A Supplement to the Dictionary of American History, edited by Edward J. Blum, vol. 1, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2016, pp. 306-307. Gale In Context: U.S. History, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3630800164/UHIC?u=east69916&sid=UHIC&xid=9ccd80c5. Accessed 4 Mar. 2020.
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